Blogs I Like: Short Sharp Science, Open Access Journals and the Coming Struggle

New Scientist publishes a number of blogs, and this is one to enjoy: Short Sharp Science, reporting brief science news. On Sept 20 2007 there was a post on Short Sharp Science entitled “Publishers Prepare for War over Open Access”. This got me to thinking about the changing nature of production and dissemination of scholarly or scientific information, and resultant management issues for academic libraries (and librarians). Following are a few websites or articles on Open Access if you’re interested:

An excerpt from a newspaper article published in The Guardian Unlimited (UK) on Sept 18 2007 by Cory Doctorow entitled Free Data Sharing is Here to Stay : “Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates”.

Finally, a word about GoogleScholar. Users are, of course, always pleased to gain access to free articles. At the Reference desk, there are ongoing questions from students or faculty about what the GoogleScholar site is (or is not). GoogleScholar is a search engine owned and run by Google. If an individual publisher has entered into an agreement with Google to provide open access to their publications – then that article will be available free online. If the publisher has not, it won’t be found on GoogleScholar. Open Access is an entirely different objective (or outcome, if you will) than “free access”. GoogleScholar has links to free articles, but it isn’t an open access site in the same way that PubMedCentral is.